Reports, proud muckraking, photos, videos and musings from the veteran LGBT and AIDS human rights advocate Michael Petrelis. Based in San Francisco since 1995.
Contact: MPetrelis_at_AOL_dot_com.
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Tuesday, May 07, 2013

Black Gays Urge Attendance at SF Pride Meeting Tonite

An anonymous source has shared this info with me and I'm passing it along in the interests of public service to the LGBT community. It's my genuine desire to see the leaders of SF Pride move tonight's meeting from their small office at 1841 Market Street to a larger meeting room at the gay community center.

With many dozens of activists planning to be at the meeting that officially starts at 7PM, expect to see and hear a very diverse crowd weigh in on longstanding criticism against Pride and the recent controversy over the rescinding of a Grand Marshal slot to government whistle-blower and gay soldier Bradley Manning.

From my source. BRC = Bayard Rustin Coalition:

If you can, please be visible in African and African American solidarity at the SF Pride office Tuesday 5/7/13. Show up early, 6:20 pm because folks are trying to throw Lisa Williams under the bus for the Bradley Manning debacle and are smearing BRC as well. Thank you in advance.

2 comments:

Glenn Stehle
said...

I've been trying to ferret out where this strange neoconservative curse that has suddently come over us came from. It takes everything the GLBT liberation movement has ever stood for and turns it on its head.

I searched the internet and read as much of the commentary emanating from LGBT neoconservatives that I could find. And what one finds is a solitary focus on “our community”. It’s like the endless repetition of “we, we, we, we.” It represents a complete turning away from the universal morality of the Civil Rights Movement, and the turning towards a parvenu-morality.

“Moral values must be universal; if they are to be real,” Reinhold Niebuhr told us. “Evil is always the assertion of self-interest without regard to the whole.” And the whole, according to the teachings of Martin Luther King, is “the Brotherhood of Man.” “All men are created equal. Every man is an heir to a legacy of dignity and worth. Every man has rights that are neither conferred by, nor derived from, the State,” he counseled.

The subversion of the Brotherhood of man in favor of nationalism is one of the five "fundamental propositions" of neoliberalism which Andrew J. Bacevich identifies in The New American Militarism. As Bacevich explains, Norman Podhoretz, the godfather of neoconservatism, believed the 1960s had been a disaster. In the magazine he founded in 1960 and which became the lifeblood of early neoconservatism, Commentary, Podhoretz promoted what he called "a new nationalism." As Bacevich explains:

Thus, part of the task that Podhoretz set for himself was to discredit what he saw as the various forms of nonsense to which the sixties had given rise -- prominent among them multiculturalism, affirmative action, radical feminism, and the gay rights movement.

Podhoretz and other prominent neoconservatives who came in his wake -- Irving Kristol, William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Robert Kagan, Michael Ledeen, Frederick W. Kagan, Max Boot, David Brooks, Lawrence Kaplan, David Frum, Richard Perle, etc. -- thus resorted to an age-old method to legitimize nationalism. “The best means of harmonizing the claim to universality with the unique and relative life of the nation,” Niebuhr explains in Moral Man & Immoral Society, “is to claim general and universally valid objectives for the nation. It is alleged to be fighting for civilization and for culture; and the whole enterprise of humanity is supposedly involved in its struggles.” Thus, in neoliberal lore, everything becomes subordinate to national objectives, the essence of which for neoconservatives, according to Bacevich, was “to fuse American power with American principles and subsequently their propagation to the benefit of all humankind.” Perhaps no one has ever summed up the method pursued by the neoconservative faithful more succinctly than Hernán Cortés’ devoted companion, the historian Bernal Díaz del Castillo: “We came here to serve God and the king, and also to get rich.”

King excoriated "the new nationalism" as a "superficial patriotism." He deemed it “a cruel manipulation of the poor” and “an enemy of the poor” that was “devastating the poor at home.” He called for a more transcendent and universal morality which went “beyond the calling of race or nation.” As Bacevich notes, the neoliberal polemicists deployed a “take no prisoners,” “give no quarter” rhetorical style that portrayed its version of truth as “self-evident and beyond dispute.” King recoiled to this pugnacious immorality which sought to "equate dissent with disloyalty”:

It’s a dark day in our nation when high-level authorities will seek to use every method to silence dissent. But something is happening, and people are not going to be silenced. The truth must be told, and I say that those who are seeking to make it appear that anyone who opposes the war in Vietnam is a fool or traitor or an enemy of our soldiers is a person that has taken a stand against the best in our tradition.

King’s entire sermon from which the above quotes came can be heard here:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b80Bsw0UG-U